Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Not well. It was an interesting class. Scalia, myself, Paul Sarbanes, Bill Ruckelshaus.
But in those days, Isaac, we had a class of 475 that was divided in
thirds. So you got to know your section very well. But I didn’t know who
Scalia was until the last semester of my last year, when I took a class
called Federal Courts and the Federal System, with a great man named
Henry Hart. It is 1960. We are in the middle of the civil rights
revolution. And there’s this guy in class who begins engaging Professor
Hart every day in these long dialogues over whether it was appropriate
for federal judges to reach in and take cases away from Southern
criminal courts, in cases where, as everyone knew, if you were a black
defendant, forget it. And this went on for about three weeks. [Laughs.] I
finally turned to the guy next to me and said, “Who the hell is that
guy?” He said, “That’s Scalia, he’s on the law review.” And I said,
“Does he know what it’s like to be black in the South?” A bright
guy—yeah. But he was to the right of Marie Antoinette for Christ’s sake.
There was no consistency in his so-called philosophy. Money is
corporate speech. This is all preposterous.

What I really love about this anecdote is how closely it resembles my law school experience. We had three sections, and although there was crossover, for the most part the people you started with were the ones you were closest to. At some point you would take a class with people you'd never met, and it was often a matter of, "Who the hell is that?" And, of course, there is the matter of who we become after. Some people become what you would expect, and some become these strange outliers.